Scot who became a leading moderate voice in the trade union movement

Born: March 14 1933;

Died: October 26 2017

SIR GAVIN Laird, who has died aged 84, was a long-serving trade union leader with the Amalgamated Engineering and Electrical Union (previously the AUEW and AEU and a forerunner of Unite), which had at its peak some 1.2 million members.

Unlike many of the firebrand union leaders of his time, Laird was a moderate figure, who was appointed CBE under Mrs Thatcher’s government and knighted during Tony Blair’s; he sought to manage the diminution of union power after the 1970s by dialogue with companies, and to preserve his members’ interests by negotiation.

In 1986, he addressed the conference of the Confederation of British Industry – a highly unusual move for a union leader at the time (the miners’ strike had been bitterly running during the previous two years). Laird was also, later, to be the first major union leader to back state funding for ballots and single-union agreements with employers, an approach that led to calls for the AEU’s expulsion from the Trades Union Congress.

These tactics may have incurred the wrath of more militant TUC figures, but they went down well with Blair’s New Labour, which was keen to introduce reforms that would restrict the use of the block vote and curb the unions’ power over the party.

But they also ensured that Laird was seen by private industry as a man with whom they could work productively. This applied not just to the relations between the AEU and employers, but to Laird’s personal appointments: he had periods serving as a director of, amongst others, the Bank of England, the Arts Council, the Armed Forces Pay Review Board and Scottish Television, and served on the council of Strathclyde Business School.

Gavin Harry Laird was born on March 14,1933, the son of James and Frances (née Luxton) and grew up in Clydebank. On his eighth birthday, the family home was destroyed by a bomb during the Blitz and Gavin, his mother, bother and sisters were taken in to stay with a miner’s family on the outskirts of Glasgow for the duration of the war.

He attended Clydebank High School, where he scraped a pass in the qually and was good at football, but preferred to skip lessons and go swimming with his brother in the canal. There he was once spotted by his mother: “I can still feel the leathering I got now,” he said in 1992.

He was also involved in Clydebank Rep as “an unpaid stagehand”, and became a regular at the Promenade Concerts at St Andrew’s Halls. At 14 he left school and undertook his apprenticeship; at 16 he joined the Young Communist League (though his father was in the party, Gavin was the only other member of the family to take any interest in politics).

After he finished his articles he joined the Merchant Navy, and his visits to countries such as Poland, behind the Iron Curtain, led to a growing disenchantment with Communism, as did the abortive Hungarian Uprising and the revelations following the death of Stalin. He left the CPGB and joined the Labour Party.

When he was around 26, he got a job at the Singer Sewing Machine factory and, having married Catherine “Reena” Campbell in 1956, bought a house. “I was honestly more interested in overtime and paying the mortgage than the union, but the shop stewards kept advocating things in my name I didn’t agree with at all.”

Having complained about their militant stance, he was told that if he thought he could do better, he should have a go. He became a shop steward, then convener and by 1972 was a full-time union official. The following year, he defeated Jimmy Reid, of Upper Clyde Shipbuilders, to become the AUEW’s Scottish Representative on the Executive Council. He was the General Secretary from 1982 until his retirement in 1995, supervising the amalgamation that led to the AEEU.

Early on in his trade union career, Laird took a management course in order to understand the thinking and vocabulary of company executives, whom he never saw as opponents. “We kept telling management how they ought to run things and when you looked at how unions were run and organised, we weren’t especially good at those things ourselves,” he later said. “A strike is a failure; our job is to secure rights and conditions for members and good relations with employers.”

Laird recognised the likely outcome of technical advances, and in the early 1990s correctly predicted that automation and the growth of service industries would see the percentage of the workforce employed as managers and technicians, as opposed to manual workers, reversed before the turn of the century (if anything, he underestimated the scale of the change.)

With the membership of his own union, even after amalgamations, reduced by almost two-thirds since its peak, he reacted aggressively, cutting management committees and attempting to reduce spending. There was some criticism of the AEEU’s extremely generous plans for early retirement and pensions for senior staff (though Laird himself did not benefit unduly), but they did cut the committee from 22 to nine members.

Laird was usually up by 5.45am, and brought his wife tea, before settling at his desk in Peckham in south London before 7am, where he started the day with the newspapers, coffee and CDs of classical music and Radio 4’s Today programme.

In 2011, the BBC reported that he had been a potential target for a phone hacker working for newspapers and – in passing – wrongly claimed that he had since died. Amongst his numerous committees, directorships and honours he was also on the TUC General Council, the Scottish Development Association, the board of Brittania Life and the Edinburgh Investment Trust, GEC Scotland, the Forestry Commission and an honorary DLitt of Keele and Heriot Watt Universities. He was appointed CBE in 1988 and knighted in 1995.

His hobbies were hill walking, reading and music; he detested being dragged round the shops. On Desert Island Discs in 1992, he chose Saint-Saens’ Organ Symphony as his top record and Pepys’s Diaries as his book; his luxury was a year’s recordings of the Today programme.

Gavin Laird, who died on October 26, is survived by his wife and by their daughter, Fiona.

ANDREW MCKIE